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Hidden Gems 6 – A Tale of Two Bridges – Part 1

March 22, 2013

I’ll be the first to admit that I am fascinated by the history of Kansas City. A question that I find particularly intriguing is why Kansas City grew faster and larger than rival cities back in the early 1800s. At one point, Independence, Westport, and even Weston were bigger than what was to become Kansas City, Missouri. In my readings, the consensus is that a primary driver behind Kansas City’s expansion was the railroads, and in particular, the opening of the first railroad bridge across the Missouri River in 1869.

This bridge was built to service the Kansas City extension of the Hannibal and St. Joseph railroad. This railroad connected Chicago with points west during the 1860s. The Kansas City Bridge, popularly called the Hannibal Bridge (after the railroad), allowed trains to pass over the river without being broken down into individual cars, loaded onto ferries, and then reassembled on the opposite side of the river.

The importance of the bridge to commerce cannot be stressed enough. One would think that the completion of the first transcontinental railroad (connecting Omaha and Nebraska with Sacramento, California) in 1869 would have resulted in Omaha becoming the "gem" of the Midwest, outstripping Kansas City. Fortunately for Kansas City, a railroad bridge across the Missouri River connecting Omaha to Council Bluffs, Iowa was not built until 1873. Kansas City’s lead in this critical piece of infrastructure allowed it to grow faster than its northern rival.

Details of the construction of the first Hannibal Bridge may be found in the reprint of the 1870 book, The Kansas City Bridge: with an Account of the Regimen of the Missouri River, and a description of methods used for founding in that river. This book, available in the reference collection at the Midwest Genealogy Center, provides a fascinating account of the problems experienced in building the bridge. It includes many details about Kansas City during that seminal era just after the Civil War. The Hannibal Bridge supported a single railroad track, as well as decking that allowed pedestrians and horse drawn wagons to use the bridge when not in use by trains. It had a section that swung on a pivot allowing the bridge to be opened to allow steamboats to pass.

My "hidden gem" in this week’s story is the author of The Kansas City Bridge, Octave Chanute (1832-1910). Chanute was the chief engineer of the Hannibal Bridge construction project from 1867 to its completion in 1869. He also designed and constructed the Kansas City stockyards, laid out (platted) the town of Lenexa, Kansas, and was instrumental in the founding of the town that bears his name, Chanute, Kansas.

Chanute built railroads and bridges all across the United States until his retirement in 1890. At that time, he took up research in an area that first caught his attention in 1875, aviation. He wrote several articles about and published the book Progress in Flying Machines in 1894. His experiments led to the design of multi-wing, biplane-like gliders. These wings were constructed using a "Pratt" truss technique, which he had used in many of the railroad bridges he designed. Chanute corresponded frequently with and was a mentor to Wilbur and Orville Wright, the inventors of the first heavier-than-air, powered aircraft to carry a human being. As Paul Harvey used to say, "Now you know the rest of the story."